After its most successful edition in 2024, Riga, Latvia’s Skaņu Mežs festival has announced the dates for its 2025 edition – the festival will happen on October 3-4 at Hanzas Perons (16A Hanzas Street). Vocalist Joan La Barbara, an icon of American avant-garde music, will perform on the festival’s second concert evening. Tickets can be purchased at www.ticketservice.lv for 55 EUR.
“Joan La Barbara has brought her adventures on American contemporary music’s wildest frontiers, while her own compositions and shamanistic ‘sound paintings’ place the soprano voice at the outer limits of human experience,” writes Julian Cowley of The Wire Magazine.
Alex Ross wrote thus in The New York Times: “Unlike many singers specialising in contemporary music, Joan La Barbara has a genuinely beautiful voice. She is also a prolific composer, having pioneered a style of vocal writing in which live voice is super-imposed on recorded tracks. She has inspired a large body of work, including outright masterpieces by Morton Feldman and Robert Ashley.”
Joan La Barbara’s career as a composer, performer, sound artist and actor explores the human voice as a multi-faceted instrument expanding traditional boundaries in developing a unique vocabulary of experimental and extended vocal techniques: multiphonics, circular singing, ululation and glottal clicks that have become her signature sounds, influencing several generations of composers and singers.
“If you think of the violin as having a body and then someone plays it, I’m living in this body. You cannot then just hit the off button,” she once said in an interview with Bruce Duffie.
With the same conversation, she illuminated the following thought process behind her live performances: “What’s interesting about a singer is that you’re constantly thinking about the sound as it’s coming back to you from the resonance of the room. I suppose that’s the same for any other instrument, but also because I work so much with amplified voice, a lot of times I’m not only listening to the sound that is coming back from the room, I’m listening to the sound as it comes into the room from speakers while also trying to listen to the production that I’m making. So I’m constantly shifting around between the sound that I’m producing, the sound that is resulting from the speakers, and then the sound that is coming back within the acoustical situation of the room. So there’s a lot of analysis that’s going on constantly within the performance situation, in addition to trying to handle that emotional expression of what I want to put into music as well.”
Creating works for multiple voices, chamber ensembles, music theatre, orchestra, and interactive technology, her awards in the U.S. and Europe include: Foundation for Contemporary Arts John Cage Award (2016); American Music Center’s Letter of Distinction for her significant contributions to contemporary American Music (2008); Guggenheim Fellowship in Music Composition (2004) and many others.
La Barbara has collaborated with visual artists including Lita Albuquerque, Matthew Barney, Cathey Billian, Melody Sumner Carnahan, Judy Chicago, Ed Emshwiller, Kenneth Goldsmith, Peter Gordon, Christian Marclay, Bruce Nauman, Steina, Woody Vasulka, and Lawrence Weiner. In the early part of her career, she performed and recorded with Steve Reich, Philip Glass, and jazz artists Jim Hall, Hubert Laws, Enrico Rava, and arranger Don Sebesky, developing her own unique vocal/instrumental sound.
Hailed as “one of the great vocal virtuosas of our time” (San Francisco Examiner), she premiered landmark compositions written for her by noted American composers, including Morton Feldman’s “Three Voices”; Morton Subotnick’s chamber opera “Jacob’s Room” and his media poems “Hungers” and “Intimate Immensity”; the title role in Robert Ashley’s opera “Now Eleanor’s Idea” as well as “Balseros”, “Dust”, “Celestial Excursions”, and “Concrete”; Philip Glass and Robert Wilson’s “Einstein on the Beach” at Festival d’Avignon; Steve Reich’s “Drumming”; and John Cage’s “Solo for Voice 45” with “Atlas Eclipticalis” and “Winter Music” at Festival de La Rochelle, France. Her collaboration with Judy Chicago, “Prologue to The Book of Knowing (and) of Overthrowing”, was performed at the First New York International Festival of the Arts and Telluride’s Composer-to-Composer Festivals. La Barbara appears as “The Widow of Norman Mailer” in Matthew Barney’s 2012 film “River of Fundament”.
La Barbara served on the faculties of California Institute of the Arts, Hochschule der Kunste in Berlin, College of Santa Fe, University of New Mexico, visiting lecturer at Princeton University, and currently on the Artist Composition Faculty of New York University’s Department of Music and Performing Arts Professionals, and the performing arts faculty of Mannes/The New School, as well as maintaining a private studio in New York.
The first confirmed supporters are the State Culture Capital Foundation of Latvia, Riga municipality and “Valmiermuiža”.
Skaņu Mežs is part of the SHAPE+ platform for innovative music and interdisciplinary art and sound art project “tekhnē”, both supported by the European Union and the Ministry of Culture of the Republic of Latvia. SHAPE+ is also supported by Pro Helvetia.
